Maria Ribas

It’s 6 o’clock. You’re done with work for the day, you walk into the kitchen, and you pull out your cutting board to prep dinner. Thirty minutes later, you blink and look up and realize you spent the entire time composing a work email in your head. Sound familiar? See more of the kitchen pictured above: An Artistic, Colorful, Vintage-Inspired Home at Apartment Therapy This happens to me all the time. And I make cookbooks for a living (for shame!).

In the deepest part of our hearts, we all believe one thing: You don’t really have to cook in warm weather. (You can blow it off entirely, in fact, if you cover your tracks well.) That’s because the vegetables are blooming and the ambition is wilting just in time to call in sick and head to the beach with a bag of apricots. But after we’ve had our fill of unadulterated spring produce, our stomachs might finally start grumbling for cooked food.

Did you just order an Instant Pot during Amazon Prime Day? Welcome to the IP Club! Now, because you probably have no idea what you should actually do with the machine once it arrives, I strong suggest one more purchase: a cookbook. And not just any cookbook. I have a particular one in mind. There are two kinds of people in this world: the gadget minimalists and the gadget maximalists. And America’s hottest new appliance — the Instant Pot — is actually meant for both kinds.

One of my cookbook authors taught me something incredibly important this year: meal planning is about matchmaking. As a literary agent specializing in cookbooks, you could say I have some pretty unrealistic expectations about dinner. Every day, I pore over stunning photos of perfectly seared fish and carefully layered cakes, then I come home and eat taco salad for dinner. I vowed to overhaul my meal planning.